An eclectic mixture of personal essays, stuff about writing, stuff about books and far out philosophy from an old baggage in a book-tower.

Month: December 2016

Until a year or two back I imagined an antiquarian to be either a blinkered eccentric of some sort – I think I had read an M R James ghost story in which an antiquarian featured – can’t say I’m keen on M R James, though he was himself an antiquarian – or some old pompous somebody who sold dusty and more or less unreadable books to people who weren’t interested in reading them anyway but just wanted to possess them. That was before I started reading John Aubrey: My Own Life by Ruth Scurr.

Basically, it’s the biography Aubrey never got round to writing. He spent a long-ish 17th century lifetime writing but his writings are all over the place – so much to record, so many new things to discover, so many distractions. What Ms Scurr did was to go through all his papers and extract all the autobiographical entries, rearranging them as nearly as possible in chronological order. She does not put words in his mouth, simply extracts a whole life from a lifetime of scattered notes.

John Aubrey was an English gentleman, comfortably off as a young man, desperately impoverished in later life when, his father having died, his inheritance was discovered to be ‘encumbered with debts’. He lived through all sorts of dangerous history, recording, amongst other things, the execution of the King. A kindly enthusiast, he was a man who made friends easily and kept them. He was naïve, imaginative and somewhat disorganised.

Things never seemed to turn out quite the way he expected. He suffered from recurrent bouts of ‘love-sickness’ which he describes in a matter of fact way, like a kind of indigestion – falling for young ladies who, on the whole, did not fall for him in return. Towards the end of his life he begins to feel the cold greatly. His eyes failing, he continues to record spells (To Cure the Thrush; To Cure the Tooth-ache; For the Jaundice), omens and dreams. He complains about the slowness of printers and fears he will not live to see his Monumenta Britannica in print.

He recorded everything, was interested in anything and everything. He travelled backwards and forwards from Wiltshire into Wales, to Oxford, over to France, and wherever he went he sketched what he saw. Every story he heard, he wrote down. He was elected to the Royal Society, and proposed to them his idea for moving blood between chickens, which was laughed at, causing his natural stammer to become worse from sheer embarrassment. But a short while later he was proposing to them a new idea – for a cart with legs instead of wheels.

He commissioned drawings of ancient ruins, so that they should not be lost to history. He collected things, including a turquoise ring, which fascinates him. He records where spots have appeared on the ring, and how they have moved. He corresponds with others about the ideas of fluidity in stones.

He loved Stonehenge, and realised it was far older than Roman times. He was even more deeply impressed by Avebury ring. He was anxious about the damage being done to these monuments – ancient stones being carried away to make house lintels, for instance, or ground up for medicine. The King asked him to make a sketch of Avebury and present it to him.

It seems that antiquarians have been around since ancient Greek and Roman times. They have been in China, in India – all over the world. Often mocked as narrow obsessives who recorded trivia in ridiculous detail for no obvious purpose – today’s equivalent would be nerds, train-spotters, anoraks – they have often turned out to be more accurate original sources than the ‘historians’ of the day. Their interests included customs, religious rituals, political institutions, genealogy, topography and landmarks, and etymology.

The reason they have proven unexpectedly useful is this – they believed in empirical evidence. They did not allow themselves to assume anything – ‘We speak from facts not theory’ (Sir Richard Colt Hoare, 18th Century antiquary). Neither did they presume to interpret what they recorded. They left interpretation to later generations but in the meantime saw themselves as saving what was left lying around after a shipwreck – the passage of time, history itself, being the shipwreck. They saved things – curious physical objects (often displayed in a ‘cabinet of curiosities’), stories, data, words, facts, rarities. They often collected books, borrowed books from each other, corresponded at length about passages in those books, or things they had discovered. They drew, they wrote, they thought, they shared information, they asked questions, they wondered.

In those days, gentlemen had the time to dream. They had a reverence and a fascination for the past. They were curious, longing to know anything they might know. They had opportunities to travel – slowly – and collect – indiscriminately – and were humble enough to ask the questions their contemporaries dismissed as foolish.

We, six of the nine clones of Emma Jane Eglantine Brown, are gathered together in the traditional meeting place, the ancient tavern of Saints Cosmas & Damian, Oxford, England on this the 28th of May 2656, our Prime, Emma Brown, having five days since died of extreme old age, complicated by viral pneumonia.

Apologies for Absence: Psychlone Margaret; Buyclone Vivien; Cleanclone Sara. They will be reporting direct to the DCR, Oxford University on the appointed date and at the appointed time. This shall be our final meeting.

As is traditional at such meetings, each clone has the opportunity to speak for herself, to comment upon, the life of her Prime and her contribution to that life.

Friendclone Sophie: But I do not wish to be reabsorbed. Prime Emma was one hundred and seventeen years old, but I am only twenty-five.

Educlone Adeline: Technically, Sister, you are correct. Our biological ages are capped at twenty-five. We grow to that age and remain at that age in order to serve with maximum efficiently. You might say we remain forever in our prime… I do apologise, that little play on words may have been in bad taste…

Lawclone Isabel: Indeed it was, as your little plays on words have often been…

Educlone Adeline: The fact remains, Sister Sophie, that we have been on this earth for exactly as many years as our Prime. We have been privileged to experience the full human lifespan, Sister.

Friendclone Sophie: But I am as much alive as Prime Emma, as much flesh and blood as she was. How did anyone get the right to ‘allocate’ me an existence and snatch back again? This is manifestly unfair, and it is on this basis that I shall not be reporting for reabsorption.

Enterclone Maria: Sister, a clone has no existence in law once her Prime has died. We were created solely to serve her. This, in our various ways, we duly did and now it is natural that we should…expire.

Friendclone Sophie: Emma would not have wished me to be reabsorbed. I was her friend.

Lawclone Isabel: Prime Emma would have been unaware of the reabsorption process, as are all Primes. Our combined functions were all for one purpose – to make Prime Emma’s life as easy as possible – not to cause her distress. You may be right in that if she had known what was to happen to us she would have been upset. Nonetheless, the fact remains: clones are always reabsorbed upon the death of their Prime.

Friendclone Sophie: And what if I choose to go on the run?

Lawclone Isabel: Then you will bring shame on the whole cohort. And even if you do elect to do so you will very soon be found and captured. You are forgetting about the microchip.

Friendclone Sophie: Supposing I have found a way to disable or remove that microchip during my twenty-five years of existence?

Lawclone Isabel: And have you?

Friendclone Sophie: I might have.

Lawclone Isabel: Well, that would have been a clever plan – unfortunately not clever enough. The microchip, which you have no doubt been visualising in terms of the tiny metallic shards that were once injected into pet creatures, is in fact a genetic marker. Every strand of your DNA bears that marker, Sister; to destroy it you would have to destroy every cell in your body. So are you still going to run? I thought not. Reabsorption is a relatively pain-free process and, like the rest of us, you will be reporting for that process at the Department for Clone Reabsorption tomorrow, 29th May 2656 at 4 p.m.

Friendclone Sophie: I will run anyway. I will run and run, and if…

Lawclone Isabel: When…

Friendclone Sophie: Until I am caught, I will hide and fight. I will fight against them, somehow. I will fight to my last breath!

Lawclone Isabel: You must do as you wish, Sister Sophie. Whatever you do, the end result will be the same. All please note that any comments of a wild, inappropriate nature must, under the Clone Reabsorption Act 2601, be stricken from all Minutes of Last Meetings before they are submitted to the formal record. I shall attend to this.

Christmas Eve. I have been sitting in the dark watching forgettable TV and feeling sorry for myself. My sister phones me from Canada.

We talk about family matters for a while. Practical matters. She is distracted by her husband who, despite advanced cancer, is determined to drag the washing machine back into position after re-tiling the kitchen floor. Go and help him – you can phone me back. But no, he’s a man and he Doesn’t Need Help.

She tells me she is going to have to entertain one of her husband’s work colleagues and family on Boxing Day. Last time they saw me I was a weepy mess, she says. It’s embarrassing.

Think yourself on the other side of it, I counsel, knowing I couldn’t do so myself. Remind yourself that it’s only a few hours and then they will be gone. How many hours can they stay?

Well, now they’ve got the two-year-old to think of, maybe five hours…

Five hours! I think.

Five hours! she says.

Maybe you can have a few excuses lined up – things that will get you out of the room for twenty minutes here and there… I’ve run out of inspiration.

We turn to the subject of my solo Christmas Day. I’ll be on my own, Mum being unexpectedly in hospital with a broken hip. Would probably have been on my own anyway, Mum having been in the home since April or thereabouts. Somehow or other I haven’t planned for it. Why didn’t I think to volunteer to muck cats out at the local sanctuary? I know the answer – the cats would be pleased to see me but the worthy women at the cat sanctuary wouldn’t. They would look at me askance as people – and particularly women – tend to do. I was born without the ability to Bond.

We talk about our other sister – how come two sisters can never have a conversation without talking about the third? She will have her family around her – her partner, her daughter and ‘the boys’, ie her son and his partner. We think/hope maybe it won’t be as jolly and wonderful as it sounds. They’ll probably get fractious and bored. The boys will probably wander off somewhere. Couldn’t cope with all those people ourselves, etc. Not that sociable.

But it would have been nice to have had the option.

If we’d been in the same country, she says, you would have been coming to us for Christmas. It would have been only natural, the two childless ones.

Yes, I say. Or we might have taken it in turns to invite?

I am comforted, inspired even, by the thought of the succession of Canadian Christmases we might have had. I remember my one and only trip to Canada back in the ‘eighties. It was Christmas then. There were plastic reindeer galloping merrily across every front garden (or should it be yard?) and plastic Santas attempting to squeeze themselves down non-existent chimneys. Fake snow decorated every window, real snow fell ‘snow on snow’ into the garden and creatures that might have been squirrels or maybe skunks looped their way along the tops of boundary fences. It would have been nice to be there every Christmas.

It would have been nice…

A bit of a long paddle, though. She is talking about the Atlantic.

She goes on talking and I suppose I am listening and making the appropriate replies, but also I am imagining myself walking on water, skimming the Atlantic Ocean on foot, only it isn’t icy cold and mind-bogglingly, Titanic-sinkingly deep like the real Atlantic but shallow and warm. Yes, I am that woman in the Dior perfume ad – Charlize whatever – and I am slender and young and wearing a gold dress so tiny and yet so beautiful it seems part of me. Water glistens down my throat, and the sun catching it and glinting off it, and I am perfumed and mysterious and splashing my way across calm waters towards a golden sunset.

Pete had never heard of a new router somehow managing to reset a person’s home page, but that was what it seemed to have done. Instead of Google, Hot Babes popped up on his screen. Although…

Well she was hot enough, he supposed – blonde, blue-eyed, a shapely figure from what you could see of it beneath that white, feathery outfit. Too much of the feathers, he thought, and not enough flesh. It was hardly worth the subscription, this site. And she wasn’t… she wasn’t behaving like a Hot Babe usually did – none of suggestive pouting, the secretive smiles, no writhing… And where was the bed? The whole set looked a bit weird compared to normal. Instead of a boudoir type thing, this blonde babe seemed to be in an office, working on a computer not so very different from his own. She seemed absorbed in whatever she was studying on that screen, didn’t even look up though she must have known he was there. Some little light must have gone on.

At last the webchat box came up. Ah, that was more like it.

Helo gorjus! Pete typed, with one cigarette-stained forefinger. And wot is yr name?

The girl looked up then. He wasn’t using the webcam but he could have sworn she could see him. An expression which might or might not have been distaste flitted across her face, to be replaced by one of neutral efficiency. Must be some sort of role-play, Pete thought: a variation on the one where there was a nurse in a very short, starched white uniform which would conveniently get removed, in instalments. Sometimes the one fee covered all. Sometimes the girl would pause and demand extra in bitcoin before she took off the rest. When were those feathers going to start falling? He hoped she wasn’t going to want the extra. Pete had never really understood bitcoin, and couldn’t be bothered to find out. She was taking her own sweet time about replying.

Nameless, she replied, eventually. And your name please? All this was beginning to unnerve Pete. His head was beginning to thump again. Why hadn’t Google come up? What was this?

Pete.

Pete short for Peter? Peter what?

Hey, liten up babe…

Surname now, please, and any middle names. Reluctantly, he typed in the information. Surely they didn’t usually ask for surnames? It was getting weirder by the minute but he couldn’t seem to unglue his hands from the keyboard.

Nameless is typing…

Nameless is typing…

The girl in the feathers appeared to be looking down a list of names, then second list of names. As she typed, he spotted something. There was something on the desk beside her. It moved… it was alive. A small, black, silky creature that looked very much like a cat. It came closer and bent to rub its head against her ear. Nameless reached up a slender, well-manicured hand to acknowledge the affectionate greeting. Then it walked right across her keyboard and for a second or two was looking straight out of the screen. What was it about that cat? Something familiar…

Nameless is…

You do not appear on my database, Mr Peter.

Yr wot?

You do not feature on any of my lists, Mr Peter. I believe the most helpful course of action would be to transfer you to a colleague.

Wot colleeg?

A colleague in different department. Transferring you now.

Hang on, Nameless. Cum bak hear!!

But another face had appeared on the screen. This time it was a middle-aged man in a very dirty singlet. He was in the process of mopping a sweaty, soot-smeared brow with what might once, many aeons ago, have been a white handkerchief.

What can I do for you tonight, mate?

Tonite? Iss no even diner tim hear!

Different time zone, matey. Different everything. Black as the night and fiery as a furnace, hahaha. Name?

Pete.

Pete what?

Jus went thru all that with the other one.

Well just go thru it again, eh, Pete? Humour me. Surname and any middle names? Ah, here you are. I found you on my Little List. Hmmm…nice one! No fewer than three pitchforks against your name, Pete. You’ll be a splendid addition. Come on down, mate…

Down were?

Down here of course, matey. Come a little closer to the screen, that’s right. It won’t hurt much I promise you.

The doorbell-leaner was the postman, with a flattish cardboard package. “Looks like a new router maybe, Pete,” he said. For a moment, still trying to prise his eyelids open and squinting against the light, Pete squinted suspiciously at the man’s face, wondered how a postman knew his name. Then it came to him – Jerry. They’d been at school together, once, a long time ago. Jerry: quiet and dull. Wouldn’t say boo to a goose. No real challenge. Apart from the occasional routine beating for the purposes of extracting cash Pete had hardly noticed him. The loser had never had much worth stealing, anyway.

Jerry was sweating and obviously ill-at-ease. I’d sock you one in the eye just for old times’ sake, you fat git, thought Pete. Lucky for you I don’t feel up to it this morning.

Jerry cleared his throat. ‘That cat, Pete…’

‘What cat, Jerry?’

‘The little black one.’

‘I ain’t seen no cat, Jerry.’

‘Oh, I see, only…. only if you had seen it I was going to offer to take it off your hands, like. I’m fond of cats, see, Pete, and… well, I expect you’ve got enough on your hands, what with the wife…’

‘And what about my wife?’ he asked, pushing a bleary, unshaven face into Jerry’s and breathing stale alcohol. Jerry took a step back, and then another.

‘Oh, well nothing really, but… the cat, Pete. Were you looking to re-home it maybe? Only I’d be glad to take it off your hands, like. It’s just that one or two of the neighbours… the RSPCA… I didn’t want you to get into trouble, Pete. I just thought it might be a help if I could take that little cat off…’

Pete glanced sideways at the bloodied heap of fur on the far side of his debris-strewn living room.

‘Get lost,’ he snarled, and slammed the front door.

Pete watched from the side panel as his former classmate shuffled off up the garden path, and then down the neighbours’ path, edging sideways between a cast off plastic go-cart and a heap of old wooden pallets, his postman’s sack hunched over his shoulder. He looked miserable.

‘Dammit,’ thought Pete, and went through to the kitchen for a black sack. Whose wheelie bin am I going to dump it in?

*

When he got back he engineered some space amongst a pile of grubby, union jack scatter cushions and watched some TV; then, catching sight of the remains of a take-away curry mouldering on the coffee table in front of him, he rushed out and threw up in the sink. Feeling a bit better, he made himself a mug of black coffee and watched some more TV. Then the long, flat parcel caught his eye – his new router. Better fix that thing up before he started into the booze again, he supposed. He was looking forward to visiting that new gaming site they’d been advertising, as soon as the computer was up and running again. And then there was Hot Babes. He hadn’t had a look in on those Babes for a while.

Seized by a sudden impatience to get a tedious task out of the way Pete muted the TV, ripped open the cardboard box, tossed the instructions to one side and discovered that he was just about sober enough, by now, to plug in a few wires. He pressed the button on the top of the router and a promising blue light came on – yay! Then he hit the power button on his computer and waited for Google to come up. But it didn’t.

As always, miscellaneous. Late last night I thought, ‘I do believe I will try one of those six bottles of speciality, fruity-type beer I bought myself for Christmas’. I promise I only drank one bottle, in fact I drink so rarely nowadays that I’d had to buy a bottle-opener to go with it. Anyway, it was fruity, and a bit strange, and I woke at three in the morning sharing a fur-splotched pillow with Arthur (a black cat) who was snoring. No headache just a slight sense of confusion.

The Miseries arrived with a whoosh. I started thinking about Mum in that hospital bed, not ‘mobilising’ as they had so confidently predicted, not eating, not drinking, hardly responding. I was thinking how hard it was to live with the undead, the drowning, and how at some point you had to let them sink away down and out of sight, like Kate Winslet in that film ‘Titanic’. But how do you loosen your grip on the last of your whole-life relationships? Mum has, with the best of intentions, been driving me round the bend my whole life and yet now I find I can’t imagine life without her.

And then – with that lightning switch you can only manage at three in the morning – I found myself worrying about the new broadband router instead. Would the little brown box arrive tomorrow as scheduled? Would I be able to sort out all those little plugs and wires and get it working? No doubt it would mean yet another stressful, circular call to a surly individual, barely able to speak English in a call centre half way round the globe.

At this point I gave up and got up. Stumbling downstairs I made myself a cup of builders’ tea, wrapped the spare dressing-gown round my knees to cut out the draught from the front door and turned on the TV. Mostly it was teleshopping but I managed to find something – was it Lucy Worsley wittering on about the six wives of Henry VIII? Or maybe she was the night before. Maybe last night it was endlessly-looped repeats of the unbearable carnage in Aleppo and the temporary ceasefire gone west again. The day ahead was promising to be a very, very bad one indeed, unless I could manage to write something.

And then I thought, supposing you were to get your new broadband router, plug all the bits and pieces in and get the all those little lights flashing? Something or someone materialises on your computer screen: but very much not the something or someone you had been expecting…

ANGEL DELIGHT

Two things woke Pete – bright mid-morning sun hitting his eyelids because he had forgotten to close the curtains last night, and some stupid bastard leaning on the doorbell. He squeezed his throbbing eyes tighter shut but could not shut his ears. However long he waited the ringing would not stop. He moved slightly and fell off the sofa, landing in the cold remains of a pepperoni pizza and knocking over a half-empty beer-can full of cigarette butts. Breakfast TV had already finished. They were on to the Business Program.

‘All right, all right!’ he screamed, and then wished he hadn’t. His skull hurt, and unknown creatures whistled, shrieked and reverberated inside it like bats in a cave. How much had he drunk, for God’s sake?

The cat got in his way as he staggered towards the door. He kicked out at it with his still-booted foot, not really expecting it to connect with the animal’s scrawny frame, but it did connect and the cat cried out and fell down. How long since he had fed that thing? Pete couldn’t recall. Why had it even persisted in hanging around? It wasn’t even his. Shelley had taken the kid but not the kid’s cat when she ran off to that feminist shelter place. Looked like he’d done for it this time, anyway – it wasn’t getting up.

The front door seemed unusually far from the sofa. That sun needed a dimmer switch. There wasn’t room on the carpet for him to tread without treading something underfoot: everywhere, clothes, magazines, bottles and cold, greasy take-away food. Bile rose in his throat.

So, this year I promised myself at least a kind of Christmas. For the last however-many years (could it really be twenty-four?) I have spent some (admittedly as little as possible) of every Christmas Day with Mum. This was not because she particularly wanted me to (I suspect she would have been happier pottering about in the garden or going for that interminably long and always the same walk around her home town).

She seemed to have selected this walk for its lack of any refreshing scenic qualities (for the roar of traffic; the tang of exhaust fumes; the graffiti and aroma of dustbins in housing estate short-cuts that only she could have discovered; the rattle of trains passing under a bridge; the recreation ground that seems to have shrunk to half the size since I played in it; the ugly little grocer’s shop she would never enter, preferring a weekly trip to Tesco – equally ugly but further away and close to a Cypriot café that sold really bad coffee and scrambled egg that looked and tasted like yellow rubber – and the public conveniences).

And as for me, I would rather (would always rather) have been at home with the cats. However, I visited her on Christmas Day out of guilt, out of duty (out of loneliness), because being divorced I was free to (and because no one else would). In earlier years she would cook (something like a) Christmas Dinner. The portions were small (unlike me, she was never very hungry) but tasty. She was a good, nursery cook.

It was at least something to have a cooked meal together instead of Ryvitas (the standard absolutely tasteless variety rather than the slightly more edible ones with the sesame seeds) and low-fat yoghurt or, in later years, nothing at all (she had forgotten about lunch). We ate it in silence balancing cold plastic trays on our knees and gazing out over the garden. In earlier years it was a lovely garden. Later it got kind of overgrown.

It always seemed to be cool and raining on those Christmas Days with Mum. (You know, those days when the sky is kind of Zen – white and featureless, and the occasional black bird flies across it?) We couldn’t converse much except in mime and notes, and it’s not that easy to pass notes back and forth and balance a tray.

And yet in my childhood it seems to me it was snowing every Christmas – thick, crunchy snow, and deep. We would scrunch along the road together, Mum, Dad, my sisters and I, to have Christmas Dinner all together at Nan’s house and watch The Queen’s Speech (recorded sometime in August, probably) and the Top of the Pops Christmas Special (much to Grandad’s grumbling annoyance) and get choked by the aromatic smoke from Grandad’s pipe, and watch the fat old Labrador snoring fitfully in front of a real fire. (I miss Nan and Grandad; I miss Nan’s Christmas Dinners, which were excellent, perfect and absolutely huge.)

Depressed yet? (Keep reading.) This year Mum will be in hospital unless she gets mobile really quickly after her operation, in which case she will be back in the residential home, and either way not knowing or caring that it’s Yuletide. This year I have absolutely no reason to go anywhere on Christmas Day, and that is good on the whole because – you know – twelve cats draped on and around the sofa, purring; CD of folk carols to play whilst reading; entertaining rubbish on TV; cook myself some vegetarian something (out of practice, but not out of mind) – something involving new potatoes, perhaps, and Brussels-sprouts, and peas, and some sort of quiche, and gravy…maybe even a bottle of plonk or some cider.

Leading up to the Big Day, and now that I am no longer at work I have been treating myself to a Christmas Movie almost every afternoon. Sometimes there are even two, one after another. I don’t know why I like them. Comforting, I suppose. I like that they are nearly always set in America or Canada where everything is slightly different and more interesting and where there is real snow (Canada) or an incomprehensible combination of sunshine, fake snow and summer clothes (America). I love how New York has always has an opening shot of yellow taxis so you can tell at once which city you’re in, otherwise it would just be all skyscrapers. I love that every single movie contains some variation on every possible Christmas song so you can sing along and feel sentimental, and I love that they are all sure to contain some if not all of the following tropes:

Father Christmas

Mother Christmas

Elves, in one guise or another

Reindeer

A sleigh that crashes

A red-haired heroine with perfect, glisteningly white teeth

A whole lot of other perfect, glisteningly white teeth

Men, women, children and infants all wearing green, red or maroon plus a jolly scarf and cute woolly hats from Thanksgiving right through to Christmas Day

Romance, several unlikely misunderstandings then more romance

Mountains of presents around a mountainous tree

Home-made tree decorations that come out of a box in the garage that everyone has forgotten about

Christmas cookies – spiced, iced biscuits, sort of – and the heroine always knows how to cook the best ones the hero has ever eaten and at that moment he knows he’s going to marry her

A gorgeous but modest fireman, in a uniform

A little boy looking for a new father

A little girl looking for a new mother

A bitchy mother-in-law

An angel disguised as a plump old lady

Santa hats

Candy canes

A smart, brittle city sister and a homely, gingham and woolly-scarf wearing sister